A Bob Lee Swagger eBook Boxed Set: I, Sniper, Night of Thunder, 47th Samurai

by Stephen Hunter

  Bob found the Sig a blocky little piece of guncraft that fit his hands glove-smooth and went to target hungrily; he locked his elbows as he put the front sight smack on the target twelve-odd feet away, fired four times on the angle and watched as the windshield fogged into quicksilver as the penetrating bullets left their legacy of fractured abstraction. Behind those smears, the dark figure kicked taut, then slumped sideways.

  Bob withdrew, and a good thing too, as in seconds, maybe nanoseconds, a burst of automatic fire came hurtling his way to spall off the hood and spray randomly into the air, chewing up metallic debris, paint dust, and friction-driven sparks. He saw now what was so strange about all this—the absence of the other man’s percussions, as his weapon was clearly suppressed. The bursts had a low, wet, rattly sound, as if made by a child playing at tommy gun with a throatful of phlegm.

  Swagger started to rotate right, to get around the bumpers of both cars, flank the shooter, and take him down from the low defilade, even as he knew that if the guy was no idiot, he too would now be on the move, rotating also to the right. So he stopped, reversed his direction, and began a journey to the left, the long way around, to find and kill his man.

  Rat watched the bullets take out the windshield and all behind them in a long sparkly rip, right to left, horizontal, but had a kind of inkling of disaster as the dancing web of punctures didn’t seem to catch up quite to the rapidly disappearing number two target. He realized he should have gone left to right, goddamnit, and cursed himself for fearing the cop’s handgun more than the agility and quickness of the unarmed but highly experienced man. He ate up the rest of the magazine—once you start shooting these things it’s hard to stop, so seductive is the rhythm, the power of the recoil, the imagery of the world dissolving before the godlike reach of your bullet stream—shooting out more windshield glass, tearing up the hood, hoping to start a fire or send something through to take out the quick mover, but he knew: Houston, we have a problem.

  The gun ran dry. If he’d more experience, he could have dumped the empty in a second and been back on target in the next, but he wasn’t sure where the mag release was, and by the time he got it tripped to drop the empty box, found another, heavier box, got it inserted and locked into place, he raised his eyes just in time to experience astonishment.

  The Impala piled into their car. The clang sent him thundering against the door, and the gun slipped from his grip. Holy fuck, where’d that come from? Spangles, fireworks, flashbulbs, all kinds of optic disturbance filled his tiny, concentrated mind, and he had to head-shake hard to get himself back to reality. He reached, felt for the gun, got it up, checked intelligently to see if the mag was still locked in place, checked again that the bolt was back and locked open, and came up to rejoin the fight just in time to blow his night vision on the four fast, bright muzzle flashes of his guy firing across both hoods through his front windshield, where dazed Tino struggled with seatbelt confusion. Too late for Tino; the bullets found him in chest and head, and Rat felt the hot spray of blood splattering from a high-velocity impact on flesh as Tino made some indecipherable sound of regret and slumped to the left like a sack of apples. Rat got the subgun—now it seemed so long—up and oriented in that direction and squeezed off a burst that ripped hell out of at least three panes of thick auto glass—his own right front, the guy’s left front and, going through and out, what remained of the windshield; the bullets left a galaxy of spatter-pattern fissures as they flew, and many hit the hood where the other shooter had been but was no longer, spanging off in a spray of sparks and pulverized auto paint.

  With his elbow he knocked the handle on the door behind him and spilled out. He hit the ground, gathered himself quickly into a shooter’s crouch, and looked for targets. It was so quiet. All street sounds had died, all traffic had stopped, the many civilians had frozen or slunk away to let the players work out their gun drama on their own. For the first time in his life, Rat felt fear. His bowels almost came loose and the ice water that he’d thought filled his veins churned into his lower colon instead.

  This guy was a pro. He was so fucking good. How could he get to guns so fast? Usually when the bullets flew, even the most hardened cops went into a kind of daze and it took seconds, sometimes minutes, before they were functioning efficiently, and it was in that gap that Rat made his living.

  But not tonight.

  Move! he ordered himself, rising slightly, again peering over the horizon of shattered glass, bullet-pierced vehicles, drifting smoke, and lights diffused in the drizzle for a target and saw none. He realized: he’s coming to get me, meaning he’ll be coming around the front of the locked cars, and when he gets to my bumper, he’s got cover and I don’t.

  That got his ass moving. He scrambled left down the side of the car, dipped behind its tail, and felt vaguely secure, when the second brilliant idea hit him.

  Shoot under the car.

  He dropped to his knees, inserted the K under the car horizontally and squeezed out an arc of 9-mil, the gun spurting, the muzzle flaring, the bullets digging up dust and earth from the pavement as they swept right to left in search of the legs of the other man. Surely they’d take him down hard, and Rat could advance from the rear, put some finishers into him, and disappear down an alleyway. He wondered, Will I get Tino’s ten long?

  But the gunman wasn’t crouched behind the car. His legs were not available for Rat’s strategy. Instead, guessing it, he’d climbed upon his own hood, and in six agile steps bounded over his own roof to his trunk, where he stood above Rat, whose gun remained planted underneath the vehicle.

  “Drop it,” he said, though both were aware that Rat could no more drop it than he could drop his trousers, and as Rat pulled back to free his weapon, the tall cowboy shot him three times expertly in the chest so fast it sounded like he was the machine gunner.

  The shots hit like hammer blows and scattered Rat’s mind. He thought of all kinds of extraneous bullshit and had a kind of memory dump as half-or quarter-images from his twenty-six years fluttered through his brain like a fast shuffle of cards, and the next thing he knew he was choking on blood and looking into the close-up face of his slayer, who pressed the gun muzzle hard into his throat, to fire the spine breaker if that were necessary, though both realized by now it wasn’t.

  “Go to hell,” said Rat.

  “No doubt,” Rat heard the reply, “but not before you.”

  Gunsmoke and silence hung in the air.

  Swagger kicked the machine pistol further under the car, where the cops would find it.

  He walked around the tilted Impala, looked in and saw Denny, ruined head back against the headrest, eyes unblinkingly open, blood like a broken bottle of wine down his shirt.

  “I’m so sorry, Captain,” he said to nobody. “You were the best; you deserved so much more. I swear to God there will be justice for this.”

  Then he reached into his pocket, made sure the plastic bag with Ward Bonson’s coded letter to Ozzie Harris was still secure.

  He stood. All along the street people were emerging from shadows.

  Now what?

  If I stay, I’m hung up in Chicago cop paperwork for a week, and these bad guys hunting my ass know exactly where I am. I have to give up the letter and wait for the Bureau to save my ass, assuming the Bureau, meaning Nick, can save my ass.

  If I disappear, I have no resources, I am probably wanted as a witness, I am fleeing the scene of a crime, though I didn’t commit it, and there will be questions to answer for months when and if we finally get this goddamn mess settled.

  But there is one thing I can do on my own that I can’t do in police custody.

  I can hunt.

  With that, he fired a shot in the air, to drive the peepers back to cover, turned down an alley, and was on the next block in total darkness before he heard the first siren.

  29

  Late night DC, traffic down, the city full of shadows, even parking available, most of the food joints that depended on lunch trad
e closed, few pedestrians. David Banjax found a space on the street, wandered around the buildings along Fifteenth Street between M and K, noted that the one on the southeast corner belonged to the competition. It was some seventies monstrosity, characteristic of the horrors of Big Paper architecture the world over. The places, even his own, all looked like midrange insurance agencies, both inside and out these days. At any rate, he kidded himself that they were working late at the Washington Post, maybe trying to keep up with him and the Sniper scandal. But they never would. He was so far ahead.

  He walked around the corner, past a Radio Shack and a Korean lunch joint, and turned into a parking lot entrance, a wide, descending driveway, in the corner building, which adjoined the Post. It was deserted but not dark, and he wound down the spiral two levels, past a helter-skelter of the medium-price sedans that reporters and copy editors preferred, until he finally reached the bottom. He didn’t like it: no escapes, not that there should be any danger. Still, his breath came hard, the air tasted icy, his lungs felt too small. He licked dry lips with a dry tongue. Are you sure this is how Bob Woodward got his start?

  In a row of cars ahead of him, headlights winked on and off. He made his way to that vehicle, a Kia, clearly a rental, and made out the figure of a man in the front seat, behind the wheel. David nodded, the figure nodded back, but at that moment, across the way, an elevator door opened, a blade of light penetrated the dimness, and a couple of people walked out, laughing. David dropped between cars and waited as the two made it to a nearby car—“He actually thought ‘disinterested’ meant ‘uninterested’! He must be in his fifties! How stupid is that?” he heard—climbed in, started up, and pulled out. Copyreaders! The same everywhere!

  When the car had disappeared, David approached the mystery vehicle and noted with both approval and a chortle that the man was wearing a fedora and a pair of Wayfarer sunglasses. He opened the off-side front door and heard a voice say, “Rear, please, that side. I will look at you in the mirror. You do not look back; keep your eyes down.”

  Now the convening literary master seemed to be John le Carré. It was turning into a spy novel. Wasn’t this the part where the pawn gets murdered by a silenced .22? Or does the pawn miraculously escape the assassination, go on the run, and somehow still bring down the government and put the bad CIA cell in prison and win the Pulitzer Prize and write a best seller, all in 350 pages.

  He obeyed.

  “This is a little melodramatic, isn’t it?”

  “Look, pal, I don’t need snark. I know you people like wisecracks, but stow the fucking wisecracks and be dead literal and we will get along a lot better. This isn’t a fucking movie.”

  “I understand.”

  “Throw the tape recorder in the front seat.”

  “I—”

  “Throw the tape recorder in the front seat.”

  Banjax threw the tape recorder in the front seat.

  “Now throw the other tape recorder in the front seat.”

  “Hey, I—”

  “Throw the other tape recorder in the front seat.”

  Banjax threw the other tape recorder in the front seat.

  “I may have to prove this meeting took place, you know.”

  “I didn’t turn ’em off. I’ll return ’em if I conclude you’re straight and that I didn’t give something away I didn’t mean to give away.”

  “Okay. Sensible. Now what have you got for me? And who are you?”

  “Who I am is not relevant. I may be this, I may be that. I may be a courier or a controller or a rogue. You will never know. But I have a gift for you, as I said I did. It’s amazing how successful you’re about to be on my generosity.”

  “I’m sure you’re getting something out of it. Nothing’s free in this town.”

  “Hmm, fast learner,” the spy guy said. Then, with a kind of practiced insouciance, as if he’d done this many times, he tossed a manila envelope over the seat to the rear, and it landed exactly in the space next to Banjax. Banjax noted the man was wearing gloves.

  “Okay,” he said. “Should I open?”

  “Not here. What you have is Xeroxes of internal FN documents, from their South Carolina headquarters, recording their courtship of, their involvement with, their bribes to, their payoffs to, and finally their comments on Nick Memphis, FBI.”

  “How the hell—”

  “We’re good. We’re not amateurs. You are not dealing with self-dramatizing whistle-blowers who are trying to get a segment on 60 Minutes. You get to go on 60 Minutes, not us.”

  “How can I authenticate? I have to authenticate.”

  “That’s your problem. Our mole didn’t have time to get affidavits.”

  “Well, there’s a time thing here. I—”

  “Jesus. Let’s see, you might use Freedom of Information to get FN’s original cover letter to the FBI seeking submission paperwork for the sniper rifle contract trials. Then run a typefont comparison. Or I’ll tell you what, since time is a factor, find someone in the Bureau to leak those documents to you to shortcut the FOI process. You pick ’em, not us; that’s your guarantee of integrity. Run the typefont comparison. If you get a match, you’ve proven that the FN official submission and the internal memorandum came from the same printer.”

  “There’s only one printer in South Carolina?”

  “In the FN USA headquarters, yeah. How big do you think it is? We’re talking a gun company, not IBM.”

  “Okay,” said Banjax, who had no picture in his mind for a thing called a “gun company.”

  “So you’ve made your guy. Hello, Mr. Pulitzer Prize. Why, good morning, Miss Senior Editor, Big New York Publisher. Do you know who I’m talking about?”

  “Yes, I know. Woodward’s—”

  “David is a smart boy.”

  “You said you had a photo.”

  “I do. But it’s not in the package.”

  “Why not? If you’ve got it—”

  “I want you to authenticate this thing first. Then you contact me by, hmm, I don’t know, wearing an orange toilet seat around your neck to work one day. That’ll be a spy-type tip-off.”

  “I’m out of orange toilet seats. Will pink do?”

  “Wear a hat one day. Guys your age never wear hats. It can be a baseball cap, a stocking cap, I don’t care, a Sherlock Holmes cap. Wear it, we’ll note it, and you’ll get the photo by courier that afternoon, your bureau. If you’re not an idiot, you’ll figure out that the photo has to be vetted by top photo professionals, to make sure it’s legit. Can your failing newspaper afford that?”

  “If I can get it before they turn the bureau into a bowling alley, yes.”

  “Otherwise it goes to Drudge.”

  “I hear you.”

  “David, fast, fast, fast now. We can work fast. Can you dead-tree folks stay with us?”

  “Yes, I can.”

  “Good. Now take your tape recorders—no lookee, see?—and get out of here. Go stand in the corner while I drive away. No peeking. And welcome to the big leagues, Woodstein.”

  30

  Swagger awoke from ugly dreams with a start. The phone was ringing. Not his cell phone, the room phone. He blinked, trying to remember. Oh, yeah, Indianapolis. Near the Notre Dame campus, for its theoretical richness in wired coffeehouses. An Econo Lodge; it looked like the best room in Nowheresville, decorated in a nice shade of babyshit brown.

  He stared at the ringing monster on the nightstand. This was not good. If it had been his cell, it could have been anybody, but if it was this phone, it meant someone was already on him. On the other hand, maybe it was housekeeping. He looked at his watch, saw that it was almost eleven. He’d sacked out here at 3 a.m. after a dreary bus ride.

  He picked up the phone.

  “Yeah.”

  “Bob?”

  It was Nick.

  “You figured out where I am.”

  “We are the FBI, you know. We do this kind of thing for a living.”

  “I—”

 
“No, you just listen to me. In words of two syllables, what the fuck is going on? I have some big gunfight in Chicago with a dead officer, two dead gangbangers, and a missing witness thought by many to be an FBI undercover. That sounds like a Bob Lee Swagger operation. I have the Chicago cops, I have the Cook County prosecutors, I have my own Chicago field office all screaming bloody hell at me, and of course I have my own director furious at me because he warned me Swagger couldn’t be controlled and I assured him I could control Swagger and then I assured him I’d sent you home to rock on the porch. Oh, and I have the New York Times alleging on its front page that I’m dirty. Hmm, I think we could agree, it’s kind of a mess.”

  “I sure wouldn’t want to be in your shoes,” said Bob. “Can’t help with the papers. Never read ’em. I get my news from Fox.”

  “I need you in. I can have Indiana state troopers at that motel in ten minutes if it’s an issue of security. I need you cooperating with the Chicago people, playing by all the rules. Maybe, just maybe, we can make fleeing the scene of a crime go away. And when we get all that straightened out, then maybe we can see where we are on the sniper. Oh, and I need Denny Washington’s Sig back. For his widow.”

  “I will personally return it to her when this is over. Right now, I may need it, even if it’s only got four rounds left. Maybe I can put ’em where they’ll do some good.”